When you buy a ticket to watch Oregon play football, you think
you'll see (a) triple-reverses with a fullback throwing a 73-yard
pass to a tight end; (b) fake punts, onside kicks and other
football chicanery; and (c) an NCAA record for most passing yards,
total yards and yards after the catch.

But do you know what Oregon does more (and better) than anyone
in the Pac-12? This will come as a shock: It runs the football.

The Ducks run more than USC used to run when the Trojans had all
of those Heisman winners and operated the student-body-right,
student-body-left offense. The Ducks are leading the conference in
rushing for the fifth straight year, No. 6 in the nation, and who
besides UA defensive coordinator Tim Kish knew?

In the public mind, Ducks coach Chip Kelly created this fast and
furious offense somewhere in the woods of New Hampshire, or
Transylvania, and no one outside the SEC has been smart enough (or
good enough) to slow it down or figure it out.

"Last year against us, Oregon snapped every play with no less
than 22 seconds on the play clock," says UA quarterbacks coach
Frank Scelfo. "I'm telling you, not a single time."

There continues to be, however, a great amount of romanticism,
and misinformation, about Kelly and the Oregon offense.

It's not new. It's not bombs-away. It's not
put-the-guy-in-the-Hall-of-Fame worthy.

"Nobody invented nothing," says Scelfo. "We ran the same thing
when I coached at Tulane in 1997-98, and our offensive coordinator,
Rich Rodriguez, ran the same thing when he coached at Glenville
State years before that."

Glenville State? That's in West Virginia.

The Ducks are good because, except for Auburn, LSU and
occasionally Stanford and USC, they've got better (and faster)
players than the other guy.

Kelly, then at New Hampshire, used to retreat to New Orleans
with Scelfo, Rodriguez and offensive coaches from all over the
country - "I think we did it four years in a row down there,"
Scelfo remembers - and pick one another's third-and-long
brains.

Tulane was sort of the think-tank of the spread/speed offense
before Mike Leach launched his everybody-go-out-for a-pass system
at Texas Tech.

"I'm telling you, our '98 Tulane team ran the same offense
Oregon runs and we got our plays off as fast, or faster, than the
Ducks do," says Scelfo. "We were going fast, scoring in bunches.
I'm not bragging, but doggone, we went 12-0. Look it up."

In 1998, Tulane did indeed finish 12-0. The Green Wave averaged
a school-record 45.4 points per game and shattered school records
by averaging 507 yards a game. They won games 72-20, 63-30 and
52-24.

Before trouncing BYU in the '98 Liberty Bowl, Tulane head coach
Tommy Bowden accepted a similar position at Clemson. Suddenly,
defensive coaches in the ACC were aghast; how would they deal with
Bowden's spread-option offense?

"My phone kept ringing," Scelfo remembers. "All of those ACC
teams were calling, asking me to come up and show them how the
offense worked. But I couldn't do it, of course. It started a chain
reaction. You can find that offense, or variations of it,
everywhere these days, in high school and college."

Not that the Ducks aren't clever and beguiling. They are.
Although Oregon has outscored Arizona 48-29, 44-41 and 55-45 the
last three seasons, UA defensive coaches have encountered more
structural problems against Stanford.

"We got displaced at Oregon last year," UA coach Mike Stoops
says. "This is a team that sees where we're weak. It's basically a
cat-and-mouse game."

Stanford was more confusing because its personnel and formations
were often impossible to accurately predict.

In the 2010 game at Stanford, Jim Harbaugh would sometimes send
out four or six players, faux substitutes, who would reach the hash
marks, and then turn around and return to the bench.

Sometimes that group, in varying numbers, would then sprint into
position, put their hand on the turf, and the play would be snapped
before UA defensive coaches could properly adjust.

"I saw how it affected our (defensive) coaches in the booth,"
Scelfo says. "I hated that it happened to us, but I admired it.
Sometimes we couldn't catch up to it."

This year, at home, Stoops adjusted. He implored the officials
not to allow Stanford to substitute illegally. The fake-in,
fake-out pattern ceased, but Stanford was superior in almost every
phase of the game and belted Arizona 37-10.

Now come the Ducks, a running team, a scoring team, with a
defense that is better than you think. But that's not the best way
to describe the Ducks this week.

They are a team responsible for selling all of those $75-a-seat
tickets in the upper deck.